Australian-born start-up Adopt & Embrace has entered the New Zealand market, with the consultancy specialists targeting Kiwi partners within the Microsoft channel.

Operating within the local ecosystem, the change management company specialises in working with partners and customers to improve adoption of Microsoft mobility and productivity solutions, with expertise across Office 365, Windows 10 and Surface portfolios.

Founded in October 2015, the Brisbane-based business provides training, coaching and self service resources to consult customers on how best to extract value from Microsoft offerings, partnering with the channel along the way.

“During the past 20 months we’ve seen that the challenges we’re solving for our customers in Australia are the same in New Zealand,” Adopt & Embrace founder Paul Woods told Reseller News.

“Specialist system integrators and licensing resellers carry out a fantastic job of sewing together and deploying technology, but customers are still asking tough questions around how they extract value from investments.

“Whether it’s a 40 or 40,000 seat organisation, there’s a need to ensure customers can use technology in effective and innovative ways to deliver value to both internal stakeholders and their own customers.”

Having built a strong reputation in under two years across the Tasman, Adopt & Embrace acts as a partner capable of ensuring customers utilise the Microsoft productivity suite, teaming up with the wider ecosystem to deliver project-based work around the tech giant’s latest technologies.

Designed to increase user adoption, improve engagement and accelerate ROI, the approach resulted in the start-up winning the Excellence in Customer Lifecycle Management category at the Microsoft Australia Partner Awards in 2016.

“We’ve built a strong working relationship with Microsoft and we’re looking to build on that in New Zealand,” Woods added. “Now the foundations are in place, we’re looking to build new partnerships across the Kiwi channel.”

To facilitate expansion plans, Woods - who was born in Invercargill - has appointed Darrell Webster to head up New Zealand operations, with the former BitTitan strategist specialising as an Office 365 consultant.

“I’m familiar with the market and the way that businesses work in New Zealand,” he added. “Darrell specialises in helping individuals extract value out of the Office 365 platform and can communicate the benefits of this to customers.

“We already have one strong working relationship with a partner in New Zealand, and we have pipeline already built as we work to complement their core Microsoft offerings around Skype for Business and Office 365.”

With New Zealand globally recognised as the number one market for adoption of Office 365 among small to medium businesses, Woods aims to capitalise through partnering with the channel to offer consultancy services across OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business, Yammer and SharePoint Online.

“We carried out a few projects with Kiwi organisations in the past and realised there was a huge gap in the market,” Woods explained. “New Zealand is full of great partners that can carry out the technology aspect of a deal really well.

“But opportunity still remains around helping individuals go through personal change to extract the best value out of that technology in the modern workplace.”

From a collaboration perspective, Woods is looking to team up with “customer-focused” partners across the country, partners that are committed to offering long-term services to end-users.

“Partners that just drop a product and move onto the next customer are not the partner we’re looking to work with,” he added. “Our ultimate play is to build a relationship that delivers lifetime value, rather than a three or six week project.

“We want to build long-term relationships because the platform is changing so much, so there’s a reason to have that constant engagement.”

According to Woods, the constant evolution of the Office 365 platform in particular demonstrates the value of a partner capable of communicating such changes with the customer on a regular basis.

“Now our role is to create strong trusting working relationships with other partners in New Zealand,” he added. “And crucially, to demonstrate results to build that trust through delivering value to both customers and partners.”

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